


when the dust starts to settle

by moonlight_mist



Category: New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Character Death, Flowers, Hanahaki Disease, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Sad Ending, author is back on her bs metaphors!!, no beta we die like kokichi, this is a rough one i'm sorry my dudes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:08:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25384324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonlight_mist/pseuds/moonlight_mist
Summary: Purple Hyacinth meaning: Sorrow, I am sorry. Please forgive me.---He slips into his room as the pressure continues to build. A cough builds in his throat, and he forces it out. He coughs a few times, until finally, a string of blood and phlegm escape.He stares at it. Maybe I am dying, he thinks. He wipes the blood off and goes to bed.
Relationships: Oma Kokichi/Saihara Shuichi
Comments: 8
Kudos: 119





	when the dust starts to settle

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Keep You Mine by NOTD and Shy Martin.

Kokichi Ouma had never really liked flowers.

When he was nine years old and still in the orphanage, one of the girls had come up to him. She was seven, and clutching a daffodil in her tiny hands. He had gone for a walk to the park, and she had followed him.

She had walked up to him and tried to give him the flower. “You look lonely,” She said, “So I thought this could help cheer you up!”

He stared at her, then said, “I’m not lonely. And I don’t want the flower.”   
She frowned. “B-but-”   
“I don’t want it,” He hissed. “Go  _ away. _ ”

She nodded dejectedly, turned to walk away. The park was on the edge of a busy street. She crossed it. Ouma said nothing.

When the car hit her, she was dead before she hit the ground. Her corpse was still clutching the flower.

He’d never liked flowers, after that.

\---

This is just his fucking luck, he figures.

He wakes up on a perfectly normal day and ends it kidnapped and stuck in a demented killing game, where things like trust and morals are rendered inconsequential.

Then again, when have trust and morals ever mattered to him?

And that detective might be cute, if he weren’t hiding behind that piano girl. Shame.

When Amami dies, he feels nothing. He expected it. Had predicted it, honestly.

When Akamatsu dies, he feels nothing. He knew her morals were going to get her killed.

When Saihara approaches him, he feels something. Of everyone here, Saihara’s been the hardest to get a read on. He’s trapped in self-deprecation, has spent most of the game so far tailing Akamatsu. He wonders what’ll happen now that she’s dead. 

“I’ll let you live, because I made a mistake.” He tells Saihara. “But I’ll kill you eventually.”

Saihara looks predictably scared. How boring- he’d expected something more from the detective. 

And yet. There’s a flicker of something in Saihara’s eyes. Something like determination, like curiosity. Maybe there’s hope for him yet.

That night, when Ouma plops down on his bed and stares at the wall, his lungs ache. He swallows a couple of times, but the feeling doesn’t go away.

He considers searching for some kind of pain med, or at least a cup of water, but doesn’t. It’s probably just a cold. And if it’s not… well, he’s probably going to die here anyway.

\---

Ouma draws a 7. So does Saihara.

That was intentional, of course. What’s the point if they aren’t locked in a perpetual stalemate? 

He still tells Saihara that he’s going to kill him. Saihara is still annoyingly frightened at the prospect. Hasn’t he realized that  _ anyone _ here could kill him? Why does he still cling to the foolish notions of “friendship” and “trust?”

Saihara is an enigma. Wickedly smart, perceptive to a tee, and yet so naive that it hurts sometimes. He blames Momota.

“You better keep entertaining me, Saihara-chan,” He tells him, and watches as Saihara’s eyes widen.

As he walks away, his lungs start to hurt again. He’d forgotten about that- it had been gone by morning, last time it had happened, and it had only resurfaced in the form of a slight pressure whenever he glanced at Saihara. 

He slips into his room as the pressure continues to build. A cough builds in his throat, and he forces it out. He coughs a few times, until finally, a string of blood and phlegm escape.

He stares at it.  _ Maybe I am dying, _ he thinks. He wipes the blood off and goes to bed.

\---

Time passes. Hoshi dies. Tojo is soon to follow.

Ouma’s lungs continue to cough up blood, every now and then. Not more than once or twice a day, but enough to be a nuisance. 

When he watches Saihara piece together Tojo’s crime, it gets worse. He smiles, swallowing down the sharp pain in his throat. 

Saihara approaches him for the third time, a day or two after the trial. He looks nervous, but there’s a newfound confidence in his gait, like a baby bird who’s finally learning to fly.

Ouma offers to let him join his organization. Saihara declines, which is what Ouma expected. After all, what are they if not at odds?

“If you trick the whole world, then a lie becomes the truth,” he tells Saihara. Saihara stares at him, clearly trying to piece together what he means. “The world could be tricking you right now, y’know? But maybe I’m lying about that too!” He gives Saihara a bright grin.

Saihara looks scared again. Ouma tells him so. He laughs when Saihara walks away.

This time, Saihara’s barely made it out of the room before a coughing fit tears through his throat. He hacks and chokes until finally the object is expelled from his throat: a single leaf, soaked in blood and bile.

Ouma stares at it, like that will make it go away.

He’s not stupid- far from it, actually. He knows what Hanahaki is. He knows what it’s caused by, how it progresses, what it ends in. Once, one of the DICE members had gotten it, had fallen for a security guard from a museum they’d been staking out. She’d managed to seduce him before the flowers in her lungs suffocated her.

Ouma wouldn’t be that lucky. He wouldn’t put Saihara through something like that, even if he trusted himself to be able to seduce the detective into feelings other than repulsion towards him.

_ (“If you trick the whole world, then a lie becomes the truth.”) _

He crushes the leaf in his palm. Whatever. He can lie to himself, too.

\---

Saihara doesn’t come to talk to him again until after the third trial. 

He keeps coughing up leaves. He starts carrying around tissues to hide them in. He hangs out with the other students even less now.

He can’t let them see him like this. He needs to seem infallible, if his half-baked plan is going to work.

They play rock-paper-scissors. Ouma was planning on letting Saihara win- nipping this stupid, poisonous relationship in the bud, tearing it out and letting Saihara leave before he nestles into his heart even more.

But everytime Saihara’s fingers form a shape, Ouma mimics it. They tie.

Ouma keeps Saihara close. It’s going to kill him, he knows.

When Saihara walks away, he coughs up his first petal.

\---

“It’s called the knife game!”

Only a day has passed- practically a record for people willingly speaking to Ouma. He wishes that didn’t make his throat tighten with the urge to expel the petals he knows are clawing at the inside of his throat.

Saihara looks more worried than scared now. Ouma doesn’t know if he’s supposed to consider that a victory, but he does.

The knife threads between his fingers. He lets it scrape one and pretends it was an accident. When Saihara wraps his finger in bandages, he laughs. 

“Now you’ll never, ever forget me, for the rest of your life,” he tells him. 

In just a few days, Iruma will die. Gokuhara will follow. Ouma will watch and laugh.

_ Remember me, _ He thinks. 

“I don’t need to steal your life anymore,” he says. “I stole your heart, so now I’m satisfied!”

He lets Saihara win. He lets him go. Poison collects in his mouth.

\---

The fourth trial can only be described as “a shitshow.”

Saihara lies to him. He’s seen him do it before, of course, but something about this time- it grates at him. Maybe he’s tired of Momota’s condemnation of lies, maybe he’s tired of death clawing at his ribcage. 

He tells them the answer. He cackles at their despair. Petals fill his lungs.

“Iruma-chan’s killer is Gokuhara-kun,” He rasps through a grin. “That’s the truth. That’s the thing you guys all wanted  _ so badly. _ ” His voice sounds like sandpaper. Thorns are scratching through his windpipe. “A truth without any lies.”

Saihara stares at him. Ouma smiles and pretends that he’s not drowning.

Gokuhara dies. Ouma smiles. There’s poison in his veins.

“You’re alone, Ouma-kun,” Saihara tells him. “And you always will be.”

Ouma says nothing. This time, he’s the one to walk away. 

On the lonesome elevator ride up, he coughs up a full flower. The stalk is covered in thorns.

\---

There are flowers on the press.

Ouma stares at the dark metal above him, in all of its black, deadly glory. He wonders, vaguely, how much it’ll hurt when it comes crashing down and crushes him.

“Dude, are you… really sure about this?” Momota’s voice carries over to him. Ouma resists the urge to scream. “I’m sure there’s some other way we could figure this out. You don’t have to die.”

Ouma doesn’t flinch when his lungs seize up and thorns tear through his throat. He lets the full blossom fall from his lips, doesn’t move when it rolls off his chest and hits the floor with a dull thud. Phlegm drips down, mixes with his bright fuchsia blood.

He doesn’t have to die. What a boring, naive, asinine thing to say. 

_ Of course _ he has to die. He chose this for himself- chose it when he killed Gokuhara and Iruma, chose it when he covered his face in so many masks that he couldn’t remember who he was underneath them, chose it when he let a little girl with a flower get hit by a car.

_ (“You’re alone, Ouma-kun. And you always will be.”) _

He coughs up more flowers. They fall to the ground and are coated in blood. He wonders what’s more deadly- them, or the poison lacing through his veins.

He will not allow it to be either. 

“Momota-kun,” He rasps, “Push the fucking button.”

And as the press begins to descend, he closes his eyes so that he doesn’t have to watch the sky fall.

\---

(When Shuichi Saihara enters the hangar, he finds dark metal dripping in a waterfall of blood. It’s the most truly grotesque thing he’s seen in the game, he decides, but not because of the murder scene. 

Rather, because of the hundreds of blood-soaked flowers that litter the ground, so caked in poison and thorns that they hardly pass as beautiful. He picks one up, as he’s investigating, and recognises it.

A purple hyacinth, dripping in blood.)

**Author's Note:**

> Whooooo yikes that was angsty
> 
> I had this idea last night while procrastinating on my other Saiouma fic. I wasn't actually gonna write it, but the inspo came and I churned out this whole thing in a day. So... here we are.
> 
> I considered making the flowers asphodels (represent death/regrets from beyond the grave) or butterfly weed (mean "stay away") but honestly purple hyacinth just fit Ouma's aesthetic so well?? Anyway.


End file.
